Waiting for a page screen to redraw itself on the Nook's E-Ink screen can be a serious test of your patience. In a side-by-side comparison of similarly formatted content, the Nook took noticeably longer the Kindle 2 to change the page. More annoyingly, the screen would blink in and out as it tried to perform this operation. Granted, Amazon's Kindle DX and Kindle 2 (to a lesser extent) do this too, but the Nook is especially slow: It took 14 seconds to open and format the book Up in the Air, for example. That time lag might not sound like a lot, but it feels like an eternity when you're holding the device in your hands.

Furthermore, I thought that having the Nook's navigation controls for the E-Ink display on the LCD screen produced an odd disconnect. If the response time hadn't been so sluggish, I might not have felt that way. But when browsing my book library, I was often stymied by having to put my finger just so on the touchscreen strip of up/down arrows and then having to look up above as my selection moved. When I found something to choose, I would press the nondescript radio dial button on the right of the LCD, look above to see what the E-Ink screen now had on it, and then look below to see what additional navigation choices were available. And all of these recalibrations would occur with a lag (I'd navigate below, but the E-Ink screen would take an unexpected moment or three to catch up).

For those reasons, in the end, having two screens in play simultaneously was a jarring experience: It meant that my eyes had to dart continually from the too-bright lower screen to the more muted, easy-on-the-eyes E-Ink screen. The auto-brightness feature lowers the brightness, but not enough; I had to dial the brightness down manually to as low as 4 to 10 percent to get to passable contrast with the E-Ink screen above.

The Nook's LCD screen makes it easy to jump into the type of content you want, including your daily content, your library, shopping options, what you last read, and settings. You get the sense that no important features are buried in a hidden menu item (in contrast, Amazon has its store link as a menu item, not as something visible on the screen). I also appreciate the page-forward and page-backward navigation buttons (which work in books, as well as in multipage screens) on the right and left: They are easy to push, and you can switch the hand you use for each operation.

Another design nicety is the black bezel that separates the off-white plastic Nook chassis from the E-Ink screen. The bezel makes the text pop more, for more-pleasurable reading. And the Nook's fonts (you can choose from a set of two to three fonts, depending on the book) are easier on the eyes than the Kindle 2's, with more clarity and definition (as with the Kindle, you get a good selection of font sizes--perfect for anyone whose eyesight requires large print).